10 Promising Video Games That Totally Botched Their Launch

Everyone looks forward to the launch of a new game. After all the pre-release marketing and hype has swollen to bursting point, the launch of a game is supposed to be a celebration of a developer's hard work and perseverance.

Unfortunately, some games just don't quite get it right. Months of anticipation can come crashing down around a developer, or in more recent cases, a publisher. Whether it's because the game arrives completely broken out the gate or its release is marred by an industry controversy, a bad launch can often derail what should've been an otherwise popular game.

In today's world of day-one patches, a disastrous launch should, theoretically, be easier to avoid. However, the advent of always-online and multiplayer-heavy titles depending on often unreliable servers makes it considerably harder to predict how a launch will go. Not only that, but the internet's intolerance for anti-consumer business practices is at such a high that it can smash a game's reputation to pieces before it's even on the shelves.

The following games learned all too well what happens when you underestimate your audience, in more ways than one.

Despite masterminding one of the biggest online games of all-time, World of Warcraft, nothing could have prepared Blizzard for the disaster that was Diablo 3's launch. For a long time, absolutely no one could play the game.

The majority of players were met with the now infamous 'error 37' message, informing them that the servers were too busy, while those who had managed to get into the game were met with something so bogged down beneath players trying to get online that it rendered the game practically unplayable.

Unfortunately, due to Diablo 3's always-online connectivity requirements, even the single-player aspect of the game was locked off. It's almost hard to believe that Blizzard could've so sorely underestimated the amount of people who wanted to play the game - after all, Diablo 3 was a decade in the making, and yet they managed it.

In a way, it was good news for Blizzard - the game sold a ridiculous number of copies, selling through the company's yearly forecast in a single week. Blizzard seem to have learned their lesson as well, as Overwatch - another game that is entirely dependent on being online - launched mostly without a hitch in 2016.